


i love you always (time is nothing)

by nevernevergirl



Category: Runaways (Comics), Runaways (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Hopeful Ending, Time Travel, gratuitous theoretical physics, vaguely apocalyptic future
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-08-20 01:54:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20219851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nevernevergirl/pseuds/nevernevergirl
Summary: Ten years after discovering their parents are a part of a massive genocidal conspiracy, Gert and Chase work together to send that first message back in time to his father, hoping to kickstart a plan to fix their past.Time travel doesn't really work like that.





	i love you always (time is nothing)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Gertchase Appreciation Week Day 2: ten years later.
> 
> sort of my take on putting the end of vol 2 into the hulu adaption? trust me i'm sorry.

"You double checked the machine settings, right?"

"Triple checked."

"And you're sure that's the earliest we can go?"

"Without disrupting something that screws us over more, yeah."

"And it's not _ too _early, right? Because maybe we—"

"Gert," Chase says, sharply. His girlfriend stops pacing, looking up at him. He sighs, shooting her a smile. "Hey, come here, okay?"

She bites her lip, hesitating for a moment before walking over, tucking herself under his arm. He shifts a little on his stool, positioning her between his legs. She reaches up, straightening his glasses on his face; they were _ fine_, but she does that when she’s nervous. 

"This is when the messages started showing up in the timeline,” he says, calmly. He’s said the same words countless times over the past few weeks, but Gert’s shoulders lose a little bit of their tension, so he’ll say it as many times as he has to. “My dad told me he got the machine working while we were working on the fistigons. And the message he showed my mom mentioned that night he...the night before we ran.”

“The night he attacked you,” she corrects, gently, and he nods, because they’ve been working on that. Naming their trauma, or whatever Gert calls it. Personally, he’d prefer to erase it in the first place with his _ freaking time machine_, but therapy’s a decent back up plan. 

“Kind of feels like everything goes back to that night,” he sighs, running a hand through his hair. “I mean. Not _ everything_. But if we hadn’t worked together on the fistigons, maybe when he called the Hostel, I wouldn’t have—”

“Yeah, you would have,” she says. She’s not mean about it; she doesn’t even really sound that sad anymore. They’ve spent the past couple of months obsessed with their own cause and effect, and the past ten _ years _ working through the consequences of that cause and effect, so it’s all more fading scar than open wound at this point. “You were always going to want that from him. Acceptance, or closure, or—”

“Whatever he was willing to offer?” Chase says, wryly. Gert sighs a _ how many times do we have to have this conversation _sigh, and crosses her arms, unimpressed. Chase bites his lip, settling his hands on her waist loosely. “I know I can’t change it. It’s a fixed point.”

Because he’s tried. That had been his first attempt, going off the pieces he’s managed to pull together—history and reality get kind of muddled together when you’ve been playing around with timelines for an indecipherable amount of attempts. As far as he and Gert can tell, when he’d first figured out how his dad’s time machine worked, he’d tried to figure out a way to stop himself from leaving the Hostel. But no matter where or when he sent the messages, he hadn’t been able to get his past self to receive them.

Gert rolls her eyes, and he smiles before he can stop himself. Gert’s not sold on fixed point theory; some of his favorite arguments with her have been about it, because she’s _hot _ when she’s yelling about confirmation bias. 

“It’s not a fixed point, it’s just a part of you,” she mutters. “And we agreed, stick close to the timeline and work with what we have and just give ourselves as many advantages as possible so we don’t, like. Create a paradox. If we haven’t already, because who _ knows _ how many times we’ve tried this by now.”

He smirks. She scowls. 

_ "What_?”

“Nothing. You’re just cute when you worry about theoretical physics,” he teases, earning a light shoulder smack for his efforts. “Hey, ow!”

“Jerk,” she mumbles, sighing and leaning forward to rest her head against his shoulder. He pulls her closer and holds her tightly. 

“Hey, if the self-consistency principle holds, paradoxes aren’t even possible,” he murmurs, reasonably. “They’d self correct.”

Gert snorts.

“Nerd,” she says, the same way she says I love you. She turns her face against the fabric of his shirt and breathes deep. “This is going to work, right?”

“I hope so,” he says, quietly, glancing at their notes—a timeline of all their significant disasters over the past decade, culminating in alien takeover bullshit, the occasional wins, and too much loss, marked with all the places their messages need to go to keep the right things on track and dismantle the wrong things. Gert stiffens a little in his arms.

“Chase. Just lie to me, okay?” she asks, in a small voice. “Please.”

“Yeah,” he says, quietly, playing with her hair absently. “Yeah, baby. It’s going to work.”

  
  
  


The plan doesn’t work. 

The plan fails _ spectacularly. _ As far as they could tell, they’d given themselves every advantage they needed, but they’d failed to anticipate all the way those advantages could fall into the wrong hands—evil parents and warring aliens and genocidal robot armies. They’d tried to play god and they’d fucking sucked at it. 

Chase is dead. 

She’d watched him die. She’d held him in her arms, and his last words had been _ I’m sorry_, which was bullshit because she didn’t forgive him. She’s not going to forgive him for dying and leaving her alone, and she’s not going to forgive either him or herself for failing. Because forgiving it means she’s accepting it, and she’s just not physically or emotionally capable of doing that.

Not that it matters when she doesn’t have much time to do anything at all. She’s bleeding in places she’s pretty sure it’s very bad to bleed from, gushing it onto her boyfriend’s corpse because everything is morbid and awful and over. She’s dizzy and weak and kind of hysterical and trying to look anywhere but at the dead body in her lap.

And that’s when she sees it, in the corner of the lab. The time machine. _Chase's _time machine, the _ real _ one. They’d been experimenting, which had mostly been Chase fucking around with light-bending and wormholes while Gert poked holes in his logic, but it works. It’s dangerous and unpredictable and she hadn’t let him even _ think _ about putting it into their plan, because that would be reckless and stupid.

But it works. It can send someone back.

She closes her eyes and presses her lips to the top of Chase’s head in a goodbye. She shifts him off of her gently, even though she can’t hurt him anymore, and tells herself that if this works, goodbye is only temporary, anyway.

She drags herself across the room, tries to remember how all the settings works. And then she pulls the lever and does what Chase would do.

Something reckless and stupid.   


When she stumbles out on the other side, she knows from the look on her own, younger face, and from the way a younger, whole, _alive_ Chase is on the other side of the room, that she’s gone too far. How many of their messages have these versions of themselves gotten? How many lifetimes and branches and desperate attempts? 

Maybe none. They’d been so careful to stick to the timeline, but maybe they were wrong. Maybe it’s better that way. She really doesn’t see how it can get worse.

She stumbles forward, into Molly. Her sister is so _ young_, it hurts more than the ache in her side. All of her friends are there in an instant, and she tries not to look directly at them, because she doesn’t think she can stand to, not when her brain’s just going to transpose a decade’s worth of tragedy onto them. 

Chase grabs her arm to help Molly steady her. He pulls the curtain of brown hair out of her face, and the double take he does would be _ hilarious _ if she hadn’t just watched a version of him die. 

_ “Gert_?”

“What? No!”

That’s her own voice. She’d been hanging back, away from the group, but she's taking a step closer now.

Chase had this theory about time self-correcting. She knows it’s not really his theory, it’s Novikov or whoever’s, but he’s the one that managed to prove _ and _ disprove a lot of it, so she’s willing to give him the credit. He always used to say he felt weird directly addressing himself in their messages, or going too close to somewhere he’d been before the couple of times they’d practiced actually traveling. He’d said always gotten this creepy, unsettled feeling he didn’t get when he was addressing the group in general or her or his dad. Like time knew he was trying to exist in two places at once. 

She can feel it now, and she thinks 16-year-old her can, too.

“It’s you,” Chase says, and they argue for awhile, all of them. She thinks she probably cuts in a few times—both _ her _ her, and the younger her, but also, she’s sort of delirious with blood loss. 

But that doesn’t matter. She can pass out or die or whatever, as long as she gives them a chance to fix this.

God, this is _ fucked _. They’d had a plan. They’d had lifetimes and universes of plans and this never, ever came up. She wracks her fuzzy mind for something, anything, the right thing. 

It might not even matter. They’d thought having a time machine was a sign they could make a better future, but maybe they’d been wrong. Maybe the future they got was inevitable, and the time travel was just there to help it along. They’d come across that theory a few times, and Chase had hated it, but Chase had never been great at accepting things he didn’t want to hear.

Her skin prickles with an uncanny feeling, and she knows it’s not just looming death when she looks up and sees her own face just over Molly’s shoulder, still keeping her distance from Chase. She meets her own eyes and she knows, in that moment, that inevitability can’t matter.

Chase is dead and she’s going to die soon surrounded by the teenage versions of the people she loves most in the world, and she knows, even if this is where she was always going to end up, she’d do it again. At 16, she was hurt and confused and scared and full of pain. In the next decade, it’ll get better and worse a thousand times over. Maybe that’s one of Chase’s fixed points. But she knows that even if she can’t change anything, just the _ chance _ has to be worth fighting for. 

She takes a deep breath, hoping she gets the words out before she blacks out for good. She focuses on herself, her wide-eyed, defensive, 16 year old self, because she needs her to believe the most.

“Find Victor Mancha.”


End file.
